Futile Efforts

by Piccirilli, Tom

  There are things you can't let slide anymore. Life is a desperate undertaking now, and it doesn't allow for naiveté once you've turned twelve. After that you're just inept and absurd.

  It's the working of the world. You can't sit back and enjoy the day while there are kids nearby. Not in the park and definitely not on school grounds. This is the modern age. Security guards buck up and give you the killer glare as if daring you to make a play for one of the children. Jesus, you're not doing anything except sitting here. Everybody wants an easy excuse for murder. You can imagine them hauling one of the teenage girls off the bus and waving her at you like bait. Here, you want to try for it? Come on, come get some candy. With the safety off, hands at their gun belts.

  The lunacy of ninth grade never leaves. Overwhelming delight, guilt, duty, the bitter embrace of adulthood. It's set the tone for the rest of your life, and you judge everything based on what you knew at that time. No cars have the same muscle or style as a '79 Mustang. No laughter as ugly as that of Mr. Vulatore, sophomore biology. No dog as friendly or smart as Hercules, who followed you to the bus stop every morning until your father backed over him. Twice. No smile as perfect as Linda Abutti's, with her eyes crinkling at the corners, the grin igniting every nerve ending in your pudgy, pale, underdeveloped flesh.

  Maybe you've committed a crime by surviving this long, and that's why you feel the need to return to the scene over and over. Or perhaps the crime has been perpetuated against you, and it's grown too hazy to understand anymore. Did somebody tug on your tinkle in the boys' shower room? Did you get your nose shoved down into dog shit at recess? One tiny torture is as good as another.

  Anyway, you're here, and you've got to get back in, take a look around.

  You are fairly certain that you left your soul in the utility closet of seventh period study hall.

  Busloads of kids are arriving, and the noise is much louder than you remember. Near deafening, ear-splitting. Christ, you drop your forehead to the steering wheel and hug your arms over your ears. So much talking, the blaring of ghastly music, and boys skateboarding in the lot, grinding down the curbs and sidewalks. Sparks splash and skitter. One bad oil leak under any of the cars and the whole lot will go up in an inferno. The skaters fall and tumble with a stuntman's coordination, boards scudding wildly and spinning on until they weakly bump into a tire.

  Girls are screaming, yelling about homework, make-up, cheerleading. The guys answer with their own love calls, screeches and caterwauls. It gets your pulse ticking harshly in your neck, all this action. You've lived in a lonely room for too long, reading books you can't remember.

  Kids are smoking, necking, eating the last remnants of their breakfasts, and piercing each other with freshly sharpened pencils. You didn't think things would change so much, but maybe it's just you who's forgotten. You aren't old but you feel old. No, you are old. A glance in the rearview mirror confirms your fears. Look at all that pink scalp showing through. The crow’s feet wrinkles and channels writhing across your face.

  So, it's like that. You used to keep count of your dead former classmates until the number broke fifty, then you quit. Drug deals gone bad, a murdered gas station attendant, two drownings, with so many others going to AIDS and cancer. Don't people live to the average age of 72 anymore? You look down at your wrist and see your blood still hammering, and you wonder when it's going to quit and whether you'll have any warning at all. What do you do with the last fifteen seconds of your life?

  Whenever you missed the bus your mother would drop you off right out front, give you a kiss that got the tough kids rolling. You'd walk away in shame with the fuckers shoving at your back, knocking your books away. Kid games that skewered. And you'd turn to watch your mother's car drive off, abandoning you to the nexus of dismay and insanity. The snotty laughter.

  Even your hatred is cliché. You, like everybody, can blame the smallest drama for your inability to cope. A failed math test and you can't form a solid relationship with a woman. A missed foul shot and you've never earned over twenty-one grand a year. A redhead turns you down for a prom date and for the rest of your life you whine about your incapacity to look a luscious lady in the eye without blushing.

  No strangers are allowed on school property, but you're no stranger. You ease up to the security booth–they've actually got the black and white semaphore arm now that comes down in front of the hood of your car. The symbolism can't be overlooked. This is a toll booth, you've got to pay just as heavy a price to get back as you paid to get out in the first place.

  The security guard is short and hairy, with the lines of a perpetual scowl seared into his features. It takes a few seconds but you finally recognize him: Vinny D'Angelis. A year or two older than you, he used to steal your lunch box and liked to smear your glasses with his plump, greasy thumbs. You heard he got one of his professors pregnant while he was failing at the community college. The kind of thing that should've been a disgrace but must've just made him feel proud when he had a beer with the boys. The professor left in the midst of a media blitz, had the kid, and moved back in with her parents. Sometimes your life moved backwards like you were on a conveyor belt.

  The dead are always nearby, ready to dive. Teachers move toward the front doors like a SWAT team: edgy, wary, and checking every angle for danger, but still somehow in control. They look up to see what might be falling down on them from the sky. Somebody's throwing red viscera against the clouds.

  You recognize at least three gray countenances. Without quite realizing it, you begin to tug at the front of your receding hair, which started turning silver a couple of years back. At first it was a touch distinguishing, but now it scares the shit out of you. The thatch keeps growing and the damn thing just won't stop.

  D'Angelis glowers. His sneer is twenty years older but no more refined than it was the last time you saw it. A part of you very much wants to surge through his little toll gate and smash his face into the Plexiglas windows, but you know he thinks exactly the same thing of you. Fate would almost be satisfied with some kind of crazed animal struggle between the two of you, but there's something else waiting inside. You've got to get it, and it has to be now.

  They've given D'Angelis a badge that he's kept polished like he was a real cop. He probably practices ninja rolls in there, diving in and out of his little both when no one's watching. You can tell by his eyes that he's never seen his own kid and is terrified of the day when his child will come find him.

  He knows you, of course. He's been waiting for you, and everyone else like you, to return, and prove to him that you've never become any better than him and everybody like him. The circle was never very large to begin with and it only becomes smaller.

  You have no plan, but suddenly a lie is on your lips. You've got to get back to your soul. "I'm here for the reunion committee."

  Whoever's really on the council should be planning the event and tracking down former classmates, but they aren't. The ten year never happened and the twenty won't either. Nobody cared. Nobody's left. You see each other on street corners all the time, shielding your eyes and pretending not to recognize one another.

  "What reunion?"

  "'83."

  "Who's the advisor?"

  You don't have any idea, but you think about the teacher least likely to ever participate in that sort of thing. He was ancient back then but those are the ones that never die. They just petrify in their seats until they're hard as stone, and then they're used for bricks to build another hallway.

  "Mr. Samuelson."

  "Room 214."

  "Thanks."

  You drive on and park in field two, which was always off limits to students. A sixteen year old girl–luscious, mystical, with a whirlwind of raven's hair swirling in the breeze–knocks you aside like you're the transparent, middle-aged creature that you are. You're an affront to her existence and she understands this implicitly.

  A wash of impotent anger fires through you and tension momentarily makes you feel str
ong and effective. It lasts for perhaps four steps. You're on her heels, the hair snapping into your face like a bullwhip. You almost welcome its painful touch, hoping it will leave scars.

  She wheels and spits. "The fuck are you? The fuck are you doing? You fuckin' chasing me?"

  "No."

  "Good."

  "Sure."

  She wears her derision like a tiara. Another man would've broken her will to him. Or made a friend. Or acted paternal and offered sage advice. She walks to the front doors and you notice that, alongside the ivy growing against the harsh brick face, there's poison sumac in the same place it's always been.

  The school is venomous. You used to try to stay away from the shrubs, but somehow you still wound up with their yellowish plant oil streaked across the tops of your forearms. You recall being covered with rashes and having your mother swathe you with ineffective, over-the-counter hydrocortisone creams. The redness and swelling would soon be followed by blisters and severe itching. Within a few days the blisters became crusted and scaly. The girls would grimace and cut a wide path. Even the lunch ladies would cringe.

  The mauled and mutilated live in the walls. At least six of your classmates vanished during your high school years. Some claimed the families moved away, but you can feel those others moving alongside you now, alive but somewhere else.

  They never really got away from the school, and yet in some fashion they did. They never turned in their last homework assignments, never did their final laps in the gym. In a way, they graduated with bizarre honors.

  The fat kid with the kettle drum disappeared on stage during the Christmas concert. One minute he's banging along to Brahms' "Wiegenlied," and the next his wide ass just isn't there anymore. You were playing second trumpet, staring out of the corner of your eye when you watched him go. Nobody else seemed to notice. Later they said he died of leukemia. Died of Hodgkin's. Told everybody he got brain damage from the crash out on Route 287, where Bobby Hale flipped his van and hit a tree. Four others dead, one paralyzed, and two walked away with bruises and plenty of psychological damage. One survivor tried suicide six months later claiming rats lived in her belly.

  Maybe they were right. Btu the skin of that drum just couldn't take the goddamn pounding anymore.

  So now you're walking past the science labs, where you cut open worms, frogs, a piglet, a cow's eye, and the starving Portuguese orphans who came on the black truck that backed right up to the gym doors. Hustled them out while the lunch ladies and substitute teachers squawked into megaphones, "Nao toque nas paredes limpas. Nos estaremos alimentando-lhe muito peixe logo."

  Don't touch the clean walls. We will be feeding you much fish shortly.

  You see all the brown faces with bad teeth breaking into hideous grins.

  "A festa de St. Peter comecara dentro da hora. Coloque mas tabelas e tenha uma sesta ate que esteja hora de comer."

  The Feast of St. Peter will begin within the hour. Lay down on the tables and have a nap until it is time to eat.

  You're in front of your old locker, wondering if the combination will still work. If the pages you cut from the newspapers and magazines are still taped up inside. You touch the cold metal and a sob breaks inside your chest.

  "You all right?" someone asks.

  Christ, you nearly leap through the top of your own skull. You turn and stare. She could be any of the girls who refused to go out with you back then when it mattered most. She smiles warmly and it sends an electrical thrill knifing through your guts. No more than fifteen, has a studious appearance to her–glasses, ponytail, a skirt and tie as if she was at private school, which she's not. It throws you for a second. She gives a melancholy grin and asks, "You lost?"

  "Sorry. This your locker?"

  "Yeah."

  "Used to be mine about twenty years back. I was remembering a little."

  "About a locker?"

  "More or less."

  "Okay," she acquiesces, still waiting. You want to ask her if the fat kid with the kettle drum ever wanders around in the middle of the day. If the eviscerated Portugese orphans crawl down the halls holding the flaps of their stomachs together with dirty hands crying, "Eu acredito que se encontraram me. Nao ha muitos peixes aqui."

  I believe they have lied to me. There is not much fish here.

  She's got poison sumac rashes around her knuckles and you almost get homesick looking at them. Perhaps you'll meet again another two decades from now, both of you roaming about the school, staring at this same locker while some child looks up into mad, sentimental faces.

  "I'm gonna be late for class."

  "Oh. Excuse me," you say, flitting aside.

  "Thanks a lot."

  There's an extra glint in her eye as if she's trying to decide whether to do something or not. She's on the edge but can't quite make up her mind. Maybe bring you in for show and tell. Or give you the name of a good therapist. Or slam you out of your socks with a harrowing lie. Scream rape. Or offer herself up for a cockeyed kick, a power trip, something disgusting to tell her girlfriends about later, get everybody laughing–his belly was so big and white as a sheet. His dick was out and maybe four inches long when I finally got it up, and that took forever. I had to get on top or he would've crushed me, and he came in about ten strokes. He cried afterwards. He wanted to marry me. I locked myself in the bathroom and threw up twice.

  She opens the locker and you see that the pages and pictures you taped up are still there, yellowed and grimy. You know they're yours but you can't recognize them any longer. Newspaper clippings, magazine art, headlines. You try to read the words but she grabs a book and shuts the door again. She takes a breath and her ripening breasts thrust forward. You jump back a step as if she just snapped open a switchblade.

  "Hey," she says, "this might sound funny, but–"

  "I've got to get going."

  "Yeah, well, I was just wondering if–"

  You shrink away, wheel about and damn near start scampering off. You've never scampered before and it's sort of fun. You've never even said the word scamper before and now you can't stop. She follows for a few steps, trying to grab you by the elbow. You shirk away before she can touch you.

  "Stop," you tell her. "Scamper, scamper." It's a sound you can't get out of your head, you fuckin' nut. "Scamper."

  "But–"

  "I wouldn't cry afterwards."

  "Hey, listen, you're–"

  You turn a corner, rushing past kids walking in groups, in pairs, everybody with somebody. "I wouldn't want to marry you!"

  A skinny boy arched like a vulture gets in your way and you plow straight into him. He's probably a hundred twenty pounds in his white suede sneakers and he lifts off as if from a launching pad. His long hair flails around his ears, little peach fuzz chin curling in flight. He's got some serious elevation, goes up and flies backwards at least ten feet before he hits the wall outside the cafeteria hard. The doors rock open. You can clearly hear his arm snap in two. He glares at the protruding bone and then glances at you, then back to the jagged jutting ulna and then back at you. The pain won't hit him for another minute. A fat kid with a kettle drum says, "Holy shit, man."

  You run.

  What room was it? What was the number? The utilities closet of seventh period study hall. 306? 308? You lunge into 306 and see shadows writhing in the corners–two teachers screwing around, or two students making out, somebody giving head to the dead, or the smelly orphans still slinking around trying to get their internal organs back.

  Eu estarei escravendo ao congressista local immediamente. A remocao de meus intestines e certamente uma acao immoral e othsl. Eu procurarei os danos.

  I will be writing to the local congressman immediately. The removal of my intestines is surely an immoral and illegal action. I shall seek damages.

  There are shouts and the angry clamor of footsteps. They're probably carrying torches, they've got you surrounded. There will be tear gas soon. Those high-tech laser beam gunsights scrawling over your chest. Y
ou slip into the empty classroom next door.

  Oh yes.

  Here it is, this is it. You give a satisfied grunt and cut loose with your father's chortle.

  See. Your tortured soul has been in the corner all the time, curled in the agony of common trauma. It glances up as you enter, pale and shaky. It lets out a pained bleat as you reach down. Tears well and dribble. It jitters happily and struggles forward to meet you. You touch and the cool swims up through your spine.

  The security guard puts his .45 to your temple, and you give him a slow and knowing grin, a hip wink that says it all. Of course, it's D'Angelis. Your face is reflected in his shining badge and you can hardly believe you're the same person you were twenty minutes ago, twenty years ago. There was a time you would've begged him, or any other maniac, to pull the trigger and get it over with in one quick solution. But already that existence is drifting away. You're here to stay.

  He nods and holsters the pistol, and both of you walk down the hall eyeing all the little girls.

  Your soul is restless and fidgety with strange and ugly needs. You touch the poison on your way out in front doors and it warms you.

  Things are getting better already.

  Introduction to "With Eyes Averted"

  by T.M. Wright

  Okay, let's get something straight: We are what happens to us in this existential, surrealistic shadow show. Whatever. Whatever. And sure, existence (or what stands in for existence) is actually just a playground for grownups—and those who want to be grownups, and those who sneer at the whole idea of being grownups—and sure, we can redirect, modify, alter whatever perceptions we like; we can loop here and loop there until we find us somewhere, or somewhere else, and over there, too, and, dammit to hell, nowhere. All at the same time. Sometimes.

  What a blast! What cool-thinking person would pass it up, right?